Thinking about the problem in Koreatown I mentioned below, I wonder if there is an agenda here. Our betters at City Hall have decided that automobile ownership is bad. So they are making using a car in the city as difficult as possible.
Think about it. If there are ways to make parking easier and car ownership more seamless, and you are opposed to car ownership, then why make it easier to own a car. Why not make it more difficult?
Think about the infamous “Great Streets” scheme and the infamous bicycle lanes. The bike lanes in LA are virtually unused. The main result of spending millions a mile to create them is to make the streets narrower, adding to congestion, and slowing traffic thus making driving more difficult in the city. They remove some parking spaces, also making parking more difficult.
In cities like New York and Los Angeles, there is already discussion about congestion pricing, making driving more expensive. An Anti-Car agenda. In California we have among the highest gasoline taxes in the nation, adding about 60 cents to every gallon of gas sold. We also have some of the poorest maintained roads in the country. The gas tax isn’t going to fix the roads. Is this also part of the anti-car agenda?
But who is really being affected by all this? It’s the older neighborhoods, like Koreatown, with older, less expensive apartments with no parking that see this problem. It’s people who live there and need their cars to get to work halfway across town who are hit with the high cost of gas or the congestion caused by bike lanes.
I thought city hall was to represent all the people, not just the ones on the west side of LA or the Upper East Side of New York. It’s the wealthy that have all the great ideas, and the not so wealthy that unfortunately reap the results.
By the Way, Astrid pointed out that one good thing has come out of the parking problems in Koreatown – People are praying more. Maybe to the patron saint of parking. See my blog of nine years ago here.
JVH
